PL charge City for alleged breaches of financial rules

[Gingers Dad]

Possibly. What do you base that on? Just a feeling?

In my view, they have no chance of making the most serious allegations (funding of sponsorships and filing incorrect accounts) stick simply because, like UEFA, they won't have access to the evidence necessary to prove it whereas the club will have access to reams of counter-evidence to disprove it.

So what is left? The rest of the "financial" allegations are all old allegations, as far as we know, and will be time limited unless the PL can show fraud or deliberate concealment. Not easy. There are plenty of counter arguments for Mancini and Fordham. But, tbf, we don't know enough about Fordham and Toure to conclude, really. There may be terms in Fordham that affect the club's results. Toure may be the PL's best chance, but again it's difficult to assess without more information and the club so far generally seems to have had good arguments to support anything that has happened. And let's not forget the club made a very strong statement when the allegations were announced and have, apparently, turned down the offer of a settlement. So they must be confident.

Finally, I am not so sure non-cooperation is as easy to prove as some might think and the rest (PL FFP and UEFA licensing) fall away if the serious charges aren't proven, I think.

Disagree with any of that?

Wasn't there a long grass charge or has that gone away?

 

[Gingers Dad]

I yearn for the days where they’d bed in for a couple of months.

No time schools are going back

 

[Matt Diablo]

The only real good news about this is that seemingly the hearing will be starting shortly and we should know the outcome before the end of the season. My feeling is that it will be no sooner than early March. Hopefully we will largely win but if not I'll put my big boy pants on and deal with it. I've had enough of waiting and whatever the outcome is it can't come soon enough.

Will know in Jan. 25. Case lasts 12 weeks started on the 6th September

 

[fulabeer]

I have a few lawyers in my family and it's not that uncommon to take your time building a ecase you perceive to be good. Wether it's actually any good is a separate thing. But just because it took long isn't necessarily telling of anything.

Yet they amended the charges several time within the first few hours of releasing them.
This shows a scramble to get the charges out there, without any pre planning and time taken.

Trust me. These charges are from pressure from third parties to be seen to be doing something.

You may be right about some smaller charges sticking though. As i'm sure all clubs will have some small errors in accounting.
Also this "non cooperation" thing will no doubt raise its head again. From my understanding City did everything to cooperate with them. Hence the surprise and disappointment from within City when they decided to continue with this shit anyway.

 

[dadnlad]

Wasn't there a long grass charge or has that gone away?

Groundsman replaced

 

[halfcenturyup]

Not at all, I just think that all of this is based on the facts and info we know so far. We do not have any of the new info/evidence the PL will use (if they even have any), so I'm hesitant to build confidence without any knowledge of their new "findings".

Fair enough. Nobody knows for sure at the moment.

But consider this. There are many, many more explanations as to why the PL made 115 allegations ranging from the innocuous (for example, the PL had 115 questions that weren't ticked off by evidence produced by the club, and four years was long enough) to the malicious (for example, the PL has been pressured into it by rival clubs to damage City's reputation) than the explanation you are positing (which is that the club's executives, directors, owners, sponsors and auditors have been conspiring for over a decade to deceive the PL and were then stupid enough to talk about it openly in meetings, emails and Godknowswhatelse, when there were hundreds of other ways to do what they wanted to do completely undiscovered, and perfectly "legally").

I don't know any of the guys involved personally, of course, but I do know they aren't fucking stupid.

 

[foggy1974]

I have a few lawyers in my family and it's not that uncommon to take your time building a ecase you perceive to be good. Wether it's actually any good is a separate thing. But just because it took long isn't necessarily telling of anything.

Whether you have lawyers in your family or not is a mute point. The EPL would have charged us 1st & then the lawyers would have got involved.

Can you explain why the Mcfc & the premier league in a joint enterprise went to court to stop this becoming common knowledge

 

[eastlandsblue]

That’s basically a reformulation of Andy Gray’s line “there’s 115 charges, they must have done something wrong”

They’ll definitely get a fine for non cooperation. And like the uefa charges that’s enough for most simpleton to say we were guilty

 

[Chris in London]

They’ll definitely get a fine for non cooperation. And like the uefa charges that’s enough for most simpleton to say we were guilty

It’s not definite. Probable, but not definite.

 

[Rory Bluelow]

They’ll definitely get a fine for non cooperation. And like the uefa charges that’s enough for most simpleton to say we were guilty

I don’t think that’s definite at all - the only thing definite is that EPL think City are in breach but that’s a million miles away from the Independent Panel reaching the same conclusion. If it does happen, I do agree about how simpletons will try to spin it.